‘But it’s male’: scientists report earliest known mosquito fossil from a time when both sexes fed on blood
- Scientist with amber fossils from Lebanese forest uses hi-tech equipment in China to identify preserved mosquitoes
- Paper says male of the species may once have fed on blood, as female mosquitoes still do, before evolving to live off plants
While only female mosquitoes feed on blood today, researchers have discovered a new mosquito species – the earliest yet discovered – in which the males may have also fed on blood.
The discovery, made possible with the help of advanced microscope equipment in China, challenges the scientific record for how early mosquito evolution occurred.
The two male fossilised mosquitoes found in Lebanese amber dated to the Early Cretaceous period were reported in a paper published by the international research team on Monday in the Cell Press journal Current Biology.
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Dany Azar, lead author of the paper and a researcher at the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology under the Chinese Academy of Sciences and at Lebanese University, discovered samples of amber that formed under a tropical forest in central Lebanon.
After not studying these samples for more than a decade, Azar began looking at the fossils last year, but a lack of reliable equipment meant he could not clearly identify them, said Huang Diying, a researcher at the Nanjing institute and an author of the paper
On Tuesday, Huang said that after Azar joined the Nanjing Institute in February, he was able to use the institute’s advanced equipment to identify the fossils.
The Chinese-language news site the Science Times said while at the institute Azar used laser confocal and fluorescence microscopes to observe the fossils. With this equipment scientists could “see the fossils very clearly” and identify their features, Huang said.